March 2005

MB Foster offers March training for Eloquence

MB Foster Associates, an HP Platinum migration partner, is offering a three-day class to train IT professionals in Eloquence, the open systems alternative database that’s a work-alike of the HP 3000’s IMAGE/SQL database.

Consultants and developers in the 3000 community are praising Eloquence as the most efficient and cost-effective replacement for IMAGE. “In my life, I have run into fairly few exceptional software products,” said Craig Lalley, owner of consulting firm EchoTech. “Adager, VESOFT, and now Eloquence are up there on that list. I have been working with it for over a year now. I am continuously amazed not only at what it does, but that the documentation and support are second to none. Converting from IMAGE to Eloquence can be done overnight. The IMAGE libraries are outstanding. ODBC support is impeccable.”

HP 3000 advocate and MPE/iX application developer Wirt Atmar, whose company is developing a version of its QueryCalc report writer using Eloquence, had praise for the database from Marxmeier AG.

“Marxmeier has made moving an existing IMAGE database over to Eloquence almost painless,” Atmar said. “I’ve been impressed with Eloquence’s speed and robustness, and with the depth of its documentation. If you wish to develop applications on either an HP-UX, Linux or Windows host to access those databases, Eloquence’s IDE (once you catch on to its idiosyncrasies) is a pleasure to use.”

The MB Foster class on the database, held at the company’s headquarters in Ontario just outside of Ottawa, meets March 29-31. MB Foster is a North American distributor of Eloquence. The company also offers UDALink for ODBC and JDBC access to both IMAGE and Eloquence, as well as Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. Company founder Birket Foster said UDALink helps with cross database access between those data sources. For more information contact the company at 800-ANSWERS or www.mbfoster.com.